I’m going to watch the film “Flight 93” again as my 9/11 commemoration. It is an excellent, if almost too clinical, approximation of what went on when the terrorists tried to fly a plane into the Capitol or White House, after picking what had to be the worst possible set of passengers to try to intimidate. Otherwise, I will avoid TV commentary today as I would the plague. Turner Movie Classics may have been making some wry commentary the last two days: first, it ran a series of old historicla disaster movies like “A Night To Remember” (The Titanic) and “San Francisco” (the earthquake and the fire). Then last night was “cult night.” September 11 and its aftermath was all about cults: Islam, Al Qida, neocons, Truthers.
This date will also always remind me of the utter incompetence of the news media. I will never forget the idiot on CNN who, after the second plane hit a tower, said when a colleague offered that it looked like a terrorist attack, that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, that it just could be a coincidence. These are the people we trust to inform us about events affecting our lives.
1. Justifiable homicide? Tucker Gales, a 15-year-old from Columbia County in Georgia shot his father in the head with a .22-caliber rifle back in October 2020. Last week, a grand jury decided that Gales explanation that he did it because “he had enough of his father abusing his mother” was good enough for them. The teen will not be indicted. Good.
Wesley Gales’ had a well-documented pattern of violent abuse. He allegedly threatened to shoot his son in the head and “kicked his ex-wife in the groin area,” the The Augusta Chronicle reported. A few months before his son killed him, Wesley Gales pleaded guilty to domestic abuse and child cruelty charges. “The police visited the home multiple times since 2011. No action was taken to remove this family from the danger in the home. He pleaded for help on multiple occasions and the system failed him,” said Emily Martinez, the organizer of a GoFundMe campaign for Tucker. “It’s a sad day because this child had to take matters into his own to hands to defend and protect him and his mom.”
The grand jury call doesn’t surprise me, and it is consistent with a lot of cases as well. I once wrote an appellate brief for a man who was convicted of shooting the neighborhood bully who regularly beat him up. There were a lot of self-defense opinions holding that a potential victim with good reason to believe that an individual was getting ready to seriously injure him or her was justified in using deadly force. The fact that the shooter in this case was a juvenile made his case especially compelling.
2. Incompetent ad of the year! Here’s a WayFair ad for a coffee table:
Here’s another shot of the same photo:
Apparently the photo originated with the supplier. Nobody at Wayfair can read upside-down, I guess. An investigation is underway…
What are the odds that Randy Newman’s satirical song would be attacked today as offensive and accused of making short people feel unsafe? I think pretty high in favor, don’t you?
I was thinking about this after watching “Movie 43” last night, an astounding 2013 project in which a huge, all-star cast was recruited into doing a series of sophomoric, gutter humor skits that had bad taste galore but not much humor or wit beyond “Oh my God, I can’t believe they did that!” Still, while the movie got horrible reviews (although the critics calling it “The Worst Movie Ever Made” beclowned themselves: I can name 20 worse ones off the top of my head) and bombed, I am pretty sure that it would spark boycotts and “cancellations” today for being so spectacularly politically incorrect. Watching it, I was nostalgic for the time when artists could cross lines and not have a virtual price placed on their heads. In just seven years, we have come to a place where Americans are terrified of enraging the woke. I think watching Movie 43 is good tonic for that, and also good practice for those who want to purge their inner weenie.
1. One more bit of proof that we should not trust “experts,” scientists, or academics. Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has written several best-selling books, such as “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” (2011) and “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” (2018) and is regarded as a public intellectual. Yet when the New York Times asked him, “Do you see any irrational beliefs as useful?,” Pinker answered,
“Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, it’s a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.”
Yes, this respected intellectual believes that deceiving the public is justified if it leads them to support the “right” policies and beliefs. He, and those like him, are the real threats to democracy.
My Harvard diploma is already facing the wall; staring today, I’m going to spit at it when I pass by…
Coincidentally, today I was asked to write something for my class’s reunion book. What should I write?
By all means, talk about the President’s vaccine mandate if you want, or anything else ethics-related. I wish I had time to do a deep dive into the legality of such a move, and I wish the news media was competent enough to do one for me. I do like the question offered on several blogs about how Biden thinks that he can mandate vaccinations when he is on record saying that he can’t mandate masks.
1. Look! Another survey you can’t trust! Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” is co-founder of Fix Our House, a new campaign for proportional representation designed, apparently, to turn the U.S. into Italy. It’s a bad idea, but in a Times op-ed, he argues for six parties, divided according to ideological fault lines. He even has a 20 question survey you can take that places you in or near one of the parties.
Here is how valid that survey is: I was told “You are closest to the Christian Conservative Party.” To be fair to Lee, his survey did place me closer to dead center than to that party, and furthest away from The Progressive Party.
2. Foiled again! President Biden one again had to pull the nomination of an openly radical zealot from a position such an individual has no business being in: David Chipman will not head the ATF. He openly advocated banning many kinds of guns, and has been hostile to the Second Amendment. Before his nomination, Chipman worked as a senior policy adviser at the Giffords Law Center, which announces on its website landing page, “We’re on a mission to save lives from gun violence.” Translation: “We’re on a mission to make it difficult for law-abiding citizens to acquire firearms. Chipman’s exchange with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year should have sealed his fate. Kennedy asked Chipman, “Do you believe in private ownership of assault weapons?” Chipman quickly responded in the affirmative. Kennedy then asked him, “Do you believe in banning assault weapons?” Chipman responded that he does. So Kennedy asked how Chipman would define “assault weapons.” Chipman said that “assault weapons would be something that members of Congress would define.”
“Well, how do you define it?” Kennedy asked. Chipman finally said, “There’s no way I could define an assault weapon.”
Got it. He wants to ban a kind of guns he can’t define, and that could be defined any way the government chooses.
I’ll post the 25 stipulations from Part I at the bottom of Part II for easy reference; I’ll be quoting the number in some cases. But not right now…I realized that an introduction is necessary.
It’s important to clarify an essential point up front: as long as the two sides in the abortion controversy refuse to acknowledge the validity of the other side’s interest and concern, no solution to the problem is possible, and until that point, it is almost a waste of time discussing it. In this respect, it is like another ongoing ethics conflict, the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. (That one I believe is hopeless, and the only solution is an unethical one: a war that leaves one side or the other standing. That may happen; I don’t see it as a likely resolution of the abortion question.
Related to this condition precedent to any resolution is the fact that the pro- and anti- abortion sides (Let’s send “pro-life and “pro-choice” to ethics hell where they belong) must stop demonizing the other. That practice makes compromise and literally impossible, and a problem like abortion cannot be addressed ethically without the recognition that balancing of interests must occur at some level.
In this area, abortion separates itself from the ethics and human rights dispute it most resembles. The analogy is useful in some respects (as we shall see), but not in the area of compromise. The period preceding the Civil War was a fiasco of attempted compromise regarding slavery, and every attempt made the situation worse, more unethical, more unjust, and more contentious. Slavery really is an absolutist problem: it is absolutely wrong, and there are not ethical principles on both sides, unlike abortion. The pro-slavery case was economic, making slavery an ethics dilemma (non-ethical considerations vs ethical ones), unlike abortion. Because abortion is an ethics conflict, each side must accept a solution that is partially unethical, or there will never be a solution.
The weekend was spent dealing with all manner of unexpected crises, from my sister’s dog-sitter having to abandon the pooch, then having to play taxi as she faced vehicle problems, to my wife’s business email being hacked and all of her sent files being erased, Then after a holiday, which always louses me up since we are always working even though no one else is, yesterday saw me spending three and a half hours getting a painful root canal. I slept until noon today, and now have no idea what I’m doing…
1. Multiple mainstream media sources keep describing the Texas voting bill as “restricting voting” or creating “voting limitations.” That’s an unethical description, in headlines or in the stories themselves. Nobody who is eligible to vote is “restricted’ from doing so. Laws regulating how elections are conducted in order to ensure security and integrity are not restrictions, nor do they “limit” voting. These slanted versions of reality are not designed to inform, but to misinform: their duty is to explain what the law does without categorizing it in order to build fear and resentment. Is a law saying that citizens can’t vote twice restricting voting? How about a law making sure it’s difficult to vote twice? Are laws making certain that only citizens can vote, as the law already requires, “restrictive”?
2. Speaking of fake news...All manner of media sources, especially the usual suspects like the Daily Kos, repeated the fake Rolling Stone story discussed here without bothering to check it’s accuracy—just like Rolling Stone. Rachel Maddow, whom so many of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends still swear is a trustworthy journalist, behaved typically for her (and MSNBC):
Meanwhile, did Twitter suspend the accounts of Rolling Stone or any of the other pundits and “journalists” who tweeted or re-tweeted this misinformation? Of course not. No, I’m not proud that I left Twitter in protest, I’m ashamed that it took me so long to do it…
You could yesterday, September 6, “Moral Luck Day.” On that date in 1901, President William McKinley was shaking hands at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo when a 28-year-old anarchist named Leon Czolgosz approached him with a pistol in his hand wrapped in a handkerchief, and fired two bullets into the President’s chest. Touchingly, McKinley’s immediate thoughts were of his wife, Ida, who was in poor physical and emotional health. “Be careful how you tell her!” he whispered to an aide. Eight days later, McKinley was dead. But what Czolgosz intended as a strike to the heart of America’s government had the opposite effect, making Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican considered too independent, radical and uncontrollable (unlike McKinley) by his own party to be in the White House, exactly what GOP leaders never wanted him to be. Teddy made the United States a world power, greatly expanded the power of his office and the government itself, and was, in short, an anarchist’s nightmare.
1. Baseball ethics: The Boston Red Sox recently completed a disastrous collapse that dropped them from first place in the American League East to third. As they went into battle with the two teams now ahead of them, their hottest hitter, Alex Verdugo, vanished on a four game paternity leave. Shortly thereafter, another hot hitter, Hunter Renfroe, was lost for five days on bereavement leave after his father died of cancer. T’was not always thus: in the days before the Players’ Union bargained to add such mid-season leave as a new benefit, if a player’s wife was in labor or a loved on died, it was at the team’s discretion whether he would be permitted to leave the team. OK, I can appreciate the need for the benefit, but both players abused the right. These guys both earn millions of dollars a year. They both routinely talk about the team’s quest to win the World Series, yet when their team really needed them, they absented themselves for many days because they could. That’s a betrayal of the team, team mates, and fans. I’ve been there. My grandmother, a major influence in my life, died while I was in tech week for a major production I was directing. I flew to Boston for the wake, and flew back early the next morning. I couldn’t do anything for my grandmother. My family didn’t need me as much as the show did.And I wasn’t being paid a cent for directing that show, never mind millions of dollars.
2. Curtis Flowers is suing. Good! Curtis Flowers, whom I wrote about here, filed a lawsuit last week against Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, who prosecuted him six times for the killings of four people at a small-town Mississippi furniture store. He was finally released in December 2019, about six months after the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out the conviction and death sentence from his sixth trial, which took place in 2010. Justices said prosecutors showed an unconstitutional pattern of excluding African American jurors in the Flowers’ six trials, which kept him in prison for 26 years despite never being found guilty in a fair trial. This wasn’t a prosecution, it was a vendetta. I would like to see a bar prosecution of Evans, who abused the ethical duties of a prosecutor.
Eventually it is irresponsible and cowardly to criticize all of the rhetoric regarding abortion and not make a serious proposal. I feel like I’ve reached that point.
Let’s start with what we have to work with.
25 Stipulations
I have not labored to put these in order of priority or importance, and many constitute “but on the other hand” reflexes upon considering the previous point.I’ll bold the items that seem particularly important as I post them. I am certain that I will miss some or many points that need to be considered as well.
It’s too soon to re-post the 2012 Ethics Alarms essay about why Labor Day is important and worth celebrating, as I did so just last year. If you missed it and are interested, it is here. Today we think (or we should) of labor unions as the ultimate example of Eric Hoffer’s observation that “Every great cause begins as a movement, degenerates into a business and ends up as a racket.” (I love the quote, but what he really wrote was “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” Close enough….). That fate unites them with #MeToo, Time’s Up, Black Lives Matter, LBGTQ rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, anti-nuke organizations, and feminism, as well as “states’ rights,” free enterprise, the Tea Party, anti-Communist groups, the Libertarian Party and more. Like many of those movements, however, the labor unions were necessary and advanced the cause of core American principles from a place where they had been stalled.
Incidentally, the first post today began as the first item in this warm-up. This happens a lot: the topic becomes too complicated to do justice to in a multiple topic post, so I have to move it out and start all over again. Many other topics in the warm-ups, cool-downs or whatever I call them could justify whole posts, but a stand-alone post requires searching for graphics, more writing, and adding tags, making it a far more time-consuming process. I would love to have the time and financial resources to cover ethics as it needs to be covered.Somebody should.But every way I’ve considered to produce significant income here reduces access, and it would be ethically wrong to make that trade-off.
1. Before leaving the topic of ignorance-producing journalism hysteria…do read this piece of irresponsible climate change primal screaming by long-time Times Democratic Party propagandist Paul Krugman. He’s an economist of dubious quality, but he knows no more about climate science than the average greengrocer, as his column shows repeatedly. “Big business wants to prioritize low taxes over the fate of civilization,” his op-ed’s cut line reads. Nothing apocalyptic about that!
This is a guy who can’t even make reliable predictions in his own field—you recall that he famously wrote on election night 2016 that Trump’s election would mean that the markets would sink and never rise again—and yet he is allowed to make dumb scientific assumptions in the pages of the New York Times. The fact is, and it is a fact, the the U.S. can’t do anything about climate change, even assuming something can be done,without the full commitment of China, India and the developing countries, and that is just not happening. Nor is China trustworthy in any respect, but it would doubtlessly love to have the United States cripple itself economically to signal its virtue, if not its wisdom. The cancellation of the Keystone pipeline has one good point: it is the perfect symbol of climate change madness. Everyone agrees that the Obama, then Biden edict will not have any effect on rising temperatures whatsoever while costing jobs and removing an energy source, but it makes environmental hysterics happy, and that’s enough.
2. Sidewalk ethics. Were people always so rude and inconsiderate on sidewalks? Having to walk my dog three times a day for 30 minutes or more has led me to spend more time on neighborhood sidewalks than ever before, and every trip is an adventure. Spuds is too friendly for a 65-pound engine of muscle, so I avoid running into kids, unknown dogs and people coming our way by crossing the street, taking detours, and generally not taking chances. But kids come running up from behind us, startling me as well as the dog. Joggers, who have always acted entitled since they first rose out of the primordial ooze, whiz by us, at us, and from behind us like we were invisible, often requiring me to yank Spuds back from charging them. He has recently developed a phobia of wheeled vehicles, beginning with those e-scooters (if he sees an abandoned one, he approaches it like I would approach a live hand grenade). I had crossed the street to avoid an unloading bus of summer camp kids only to see an old coot on a bicycle heading right at us, so I moved Spuds onto a nearby lawn. When the bicycle began to pass us—on the sidewalk—my dog lunged at the bike, and I yanked him back. He might have come within six feet of the bike. The rider stopped and I apologized for startling him, saying that I was trying to cure my dog of his bicycle issues. “I don’t give a damn—control your dog!” the jerk shouted. “Look, I did control my dog,” I answered. “You, on the other hand, are breaking the law. Ride your bicycle on the street where it belongs, dickhead.” He was a dickhead, you know.
[Notice of Correction:It appears that I was wrong: in Virginia, bicycles can use the sidewalk, though in all of my years living here I have never seen an adult doing so. A Virginia resident so informs me, so I misinformed the old coot. But he was still violating the law, which requires sidewalk riders to yield to pedestrians and to signal their intentions audibly as they approach. He drove Spuds and me off the sidewalk onto a lawn, so he was still a dickhead, just a different kind of dickhead.]
Then there are the oblivious. Just now, Spuds and I were trapped by two sets pf parents with kids who saw us behind them and just camped out on the sidewalks on both sides of the street anyway. The father on the right side of the street was walking at a snail’s pace while one son dawdled ten yards behind and his brother meandered 15 yards behind him. On the left sidewalk, a mother with a baby carriage stopped and began a conversation shouting across the street to the guy with the two slug-like sons. There was literally nowhere for me to go. Spuds sat patiently and I stood for ten minutes waiting for one side or the other to clear.
Here’s another shot of the same photo:
Ethics Alarms 